The Theft of Your Vote Is Just a Chip Away

The Theft of Your Vote Is Just a Chip
Away

Are computerized voting machines a wide-open
back door to massive voting fraud? The discussion has moved
from the
Internet to CNN, to UK
newspapers, and the pages of The
New York Times. People are cautiously beginning to
connect the dots, and the picture that seems to be emerging
is troubling.

"A defective computer chip in the county's
optical scanner misread ballots Tuesday night and
incorrectly tallied a landslide victory for Republicans,"
announced the Associated
Press in a story on Nov. 7, just a few days after the
2002 election. The story added, "Democrats actually won by
wide margins."

Republicans would have carried the day had
not poll workers become suspicious when the computerized
vote-reading machines said the Republican candidate was
trouncing his incumbent Democratic opponent in the race for
County Commissioner. The poll workers were close enough to
the electorate – they were part of the electorate – to know
their county overwhelmingly favored the Democratic
incumbent.

A quick hand recount of the optical-scan
ballots showed that the Democrat had indeed won, even though
the computerized ballot-scanning machine kept giving the
race to the Republican. The poll workers brought the
discrepancy to the attention of the County Clerk, who
notified the voting machine company.

"A new computer chip
was flown to Snyder [Texas] from Dallas," County Clerk
Lindsey told the Associated Press. With the new chip
installed, the computer then verified that the Democrat had
won the election. In another Texas
anomaly, Republican state Senator Jeff Wentworth won his
race with exactly 18,181 votes, Republican Carter Casteel
won her state House seat with exactly 18,181 votes, and
conservative Judge Danny Scheel won his seat with exactly
18,181 votes – all in Comal County. Apparently, however, no
poll workers in Comal County thought to ask for a new chip.

Startling Results

The Texas incidents happened
with computerized machines reading and then tabulating paper
or punch-card ballots. In Georgia and Florida, where paper
had been totally replaced by touch-screen machines in many
to most precincts during 2001 and 2002, the 2002 election
produced some of the nation's most startling results.

USA Today reported on Nov. 3, 2002, "In
Georgia, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll shows
Democratic Sen. Max Cleland with a 49%-to-44% lead over
Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss." Cox News Service, based in
Atlanta, reported just after the election (Nov. 7) that,
"Pollsters may have goofed" because "Republican Rep. Saxby
Chambliss defeated incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Cleland by
a margin of 53 to 46 percent. The Hotline, a political news
service, recalled a series of polls Wednesday showing that
Chambliss had been ahead in none of them."

Just as
amazing was the Georgia governor's race. "Similarly," the Zogby
polling organization reported on Nov. 7, "no polls
predicted the upset victory in Georgia of Republican Sonny
Perdue over incumbent Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes. Perdue won
by a margin of 52 to 45 percent. The most recent Mason Dixon
Poll had shown Barnes ahead 48 to 39 percent last month with
a margin of error of plus or minus 4 points."

Almost all
of the votes in Georgia were recorded on the new touchscreen
computerized voting machines, which produced no paper trail
whatsoever. And nobody thought to ask for a new chip,
although it was noted on Nov. 8 by the Atlanta
Constitution-Journal that in downtown Atlanta's
predominantly Democratic Fulton County "election officials
said Thursday that memory cards from 67 electronic voting
machines had been misplaced, so ballots cast on those
machines were left out of previously announced vote totals."
Officials added that all but 11 of the memory cards were
subsequently found and recorded.

Similarly, as the San
Jose Mercury News reported in a Jan. 23, 2003 editorial
titled "Gee
Whiz, Voter Fraud?" "In one Florida precinct last
November, votes that were intended for the Democratic
candidate for governor ended up for Gov. Jeb Bush, because
of a misaligned touchscreen. How many votes were miscast
before the mistake was found will never be known, because
there was no paper audit." ("Misaligned" touchscreens also
caused 18 known machines in Dallas to register Republican
votes when Democratic screen-buttons were pushed: it's
unknown how many others weren't noticed.)

Apparently,
nobody thought to ask for new chips in Florida, either.

In Minnesota, the Star Tribune reported just a few days
before the election (Oct. 30, 2002) that, "Dramatic
political developments since Sen. Paul Wellstone's death
Friday have had little effect on voters' leanings in the
U.S. Senate race, according to a Star
Tribune Minnesota Poll taken Monday night. Wellstone's
likely replacement on the ballot, former Vice President
Walter Mondale, leads Republican Norm Coleman by 47 to 39
percent – close to where the race stood two weeks ago when
Wellstone led Coleman 47 to 41 percent."

When the
computerized machines were done counting the vote a few days
later, however, Coleman had beat Mondale by 50 to 47
percent. If Mondale had asked for new chips, would it have
made a difference? We'll never know.

One state where
Republicans did ask for a new chip was Alabama. Fox
News reported on Nov. 8, 2002 that initial returns from
across the state showed that Democratic incumbent Gov. Don
Siegelman had won the governor's race. But, overnight,
"Baldwin County took center stage when election officials
released results Tuesday night showing Siegelman with 19,070
votes – enough for a narrow victory statewide. Later, they
recounted and reduced Siegelman's tally to 12,736 votes –
enough to give Riley the victory."

What produced the
sudden loss of about 6,000 votes? According to the Fox
report: "Probate Judge Adrian Johns, a member of the county
canvassing board, blamed the initial, higher number on 'a
programming glitch in the software' that tallies the votes."
All parties were not satisfied with that explanation,
however. Fox added: "The governor claimed results were
changed after poll watchers left."

It turns out the
"glitch in the software" in Alabama was discovered by the
Republican National Committee's regional director Kelley
McCullough, who, according to a story in the conservative
Daily Standard, "logged onto the county's municipal website
and confirmed that [incumbent Democratic Governor] Siegelman
had actually only received 12,736 votes – not the 19,070 the
Associated Press projected for him. A computer glitch had
caused the error. The erroneous tally would have put
Siegelman on top by 3,582 votes, but the corrected one gave
Riley a 2,752-vote edge."

As the Murdoch-owned Daily Standard noted, "If it hadn't
been for one woman, the Republican National Committee's
regional director Kelley McCullough, things might have gone
terribly wrong for [Republican Gubernatorial candidate]
Riley."

Similarly, in Davison County, South Dakota, the
Democratic election auditor noticed the machines double
counting votes (it's not noted for which side) and had a
"new chip" brought in.

Hacking Democracy?

This is just the tip of the iceberg of '00 and '02
election irregularities, as reported by www.votewatch.us. Either
the system by which democracy exists broke that November
evening, or was hacked, or American voters became suddenly
more fickle than at any time since Truman beat Dewey.

Maybe it's true that the citizens of Georgia simply
decided that incumbent Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a
wildly popular war veteran, was, as Republican TV ads
suggested, too unpatriotic to remain in the Senate, even
though his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss, had sat
out the Vietnam war with a medical deferment.

Maybe, in
the final two days of the race, those voters who'd pledged
themselves to Georgia's popular incumbent Governor Roy
Barnes suddenly and inexplicably decided to switch to
Republican challenger Sonny Perdue.

Maybe George W. and
Jeb Bush, Alabama's new Republican governor Bob Riley, and a
small but congressionally decisive handful of other
long-shot Republican candidates around the country really
did win those states where conventional wisdom and straw
polls showed them losing in the last few election cycles,
but computer controlled voting or ballot-reading machines
showed them winning.

Perhaps, after a half-century of
fine-tuning exit polling to such a science that it's now
used to verify if elections are clean in Third World
countries, it really did suddenly become inaccurate in the
United States in the past few years and just won't work here
anymore. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that the sudden
rise of inaccurate exit polls happened around the same time
corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable
voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots.

But if any of this is true, there's not much of a paper
trail from the voters' hand to prove it.

You'd think in
an open democracy that the government – answerable to all
its citizens rather than a handful of corporate officers and
stockholders – would program, repair and control the voting
machines. You'd think the computers that handle our
cherished ballots would be open and their software and
programming available for public scrutiny. You'd think there
would be a paper trail of the actual hand-cast vote, which
could be followed and audited if there was evidence of
voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed with computerized
vote counts.

You'd be wrong.

Upsets In
Nebraska

It's entirely possible that Nebraska
Republican Chuck Hagel – who left his job as head of an
electronic voting machine company to run as a long-shot
candidate for the U.S. Senate – honestly won all of his
elections.

Back when Hagel first ran for the U.S. Senate
in 1996, his own company's computer-controlled voting
machines showed he'd won stunning and unexpected victories
in both the primaries and the general election. The
Washington Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel's "Senate victory
against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major
Republican upset in the November election." According to Bev
Harris, author of "Black Box Voting,"
Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many
largely black communities that had never before voted
Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to
win a Senate seat in Nebraska.

Six years later Hagel ran
again, this time against Democrat Charlie Matulka in 2002,
and won in a landslide. As his Website says, Hagel "was
re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate on
November 5, 2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the
biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska." What
the site fails to disclose is that about 80 percent of those
votes were counted by computer-controlled voting machines
put in place by the company affiliated with Hagel: built by
that company; programmed by that company; chips supplied by
that company.

Is Matulka the sore loser the Hagel campaign paints him
as, or is he democracy's proverbial canary in the mineshaft?
Between them, Hagel and Chambliss' victories sealed
Republican control of the Senate. Odds are both won fair and
square, the American way, using huge piles of corporate
money to carpet-bomb voters with television advertising. But
either the appearance or the possibility of impropriety in
an election casts a shadow over American democracy.

"The
right of voting for representatives is the primary right by
which all other rights are protected," wrote Thomas Paine
over 200 years ago. "To take away this right is to reduce a
man to slavery.."

That slavery, according to Hagel's last
opponent Charlie Matulka, is at our doorstep. "They can take
over our country without firing a shot," Matulka said, "just
by taking over our election systems."

Revolution by
control of computer chips? Is that really possible in the
USA?

Who's Counting the Votes?

"Imagine it's
Election Day 2004," says U.S. Congressman Rush Holt, also a
scientist with a Ph.D. in physics who knows more than a
little bit about both politics and computers. "You enter
your local polling place and go to cast your vote on a
brand-new touchscreen voting machine. The screen says your
vote has been counted. As you exit the voting booth,
however, you begin to wonder. How do I know if the machine
actually recorded my vote?"

It's a question that probably
hasn't occurred to many Americans, even those who used the
touchscreen machines particularly notable in states where
there were "upsets" and "glitches" in the 2002 election. But
it occurred to Congressman Holt, and after looking at the
law, the voting machines and the companies that produce
them, he concluded that, "The fact is, you don't [know if
the machine actually recorded your vote]."

Bev Harris has
studied the situation in depth and thinks both Congressman
Holt and candidate Matulka may be on to something. The
company with ties to Hagel even threatened her with legal
action when she went public about the company having built
the machines that counted Hagel's landslide votes.

In the
meantime, exit-polling organizations have quietly gone out
of business, and the news arms of the huge multinational
corporations that own our networks are suggesting the days
of exit polls are over. Virtually none were reported in
2002, creating an odd and unsettling silence that caused
unease for the many voters who had come to view exit polls
as proof of the integrity of their election systems.

As
all this comes to light, many citizens and even a few
politicians are wondering if it's a good idea for
corporations to be so involved in the guts of our voting
systems. The whole idea of a democratic republic was to
create a common institution (the government itself) owned by
its citizens, answerable to its citizens and authorized to
exist and continue existing solely "by the consent of the
governed."

However, the recent political trend has moved
us in the opposite direction, with governments turning
administration of our commons over to corporations
answerable only to profits. The result is the enrichment of
corporations and the appearance that democracy in America
has started to resemble its parody in banana republics.

Further frustrating those concerned with the sanctity of
our vote, the corporations selling and licensing voting
machines and voting software often claim Fourth Amendment
rights of privacy and the right to hide their "trade
secrets" – how their voting software works and what controls
are built into it – from both the public and the government
itself.

Secret Software

"If you want to make
Coca-Cola and have trade secrets, that's fine," says
Harvard's Rebecca Mercuri, Ph.D., one of the nation's leading experts on
voting machines. "But don't try to claim trade secrets when
you're handling our votes."

The window into who owns whom
among the various companies – most of which are not publicly
traded – is equally opaque. One voting machine company was
partially funded at startup by wealthy Republican
philanthropists who belong to an organization that believes
the Bible instead of the Constitution should govern America.
Another is partly owned by a defense contractor. Even the
reincarnation of a company that helped Enron cook their
books has gotten into the act.

"There are several issues
here," says reporter Lynn Landis, who has written extensively about
voting machines. "First, there's the issue that the Voting
Rights Act requires that poll watchers be able to observe
the vote. But with computerized voting machines, your vote
vanishes into a computer and can't be observed."

To solve
this, many are calling for a return to paper ballots that
are hand-counted. It may be slower, but temp-help precinct
workers may even cost less than electronic voting machines
(which are a multi-billion-dollar boon for corporate
suppliers), and will ensure that real humans are tabulating
the vote.

"Second," says Landis, "there's the issue of
who controls the information. Of all the functions of
government that should not be privatized, handling our votes
is at the top of the list. This is the core of democracy,
and must be open, transparent, and available to both the
public and our politicians of all parties for full and open
inspection."

Although Rush Holt is suggesting there be
stringent standards, he hasn't gone so far as to say
corporations shouldn't process our votes. But why not? Most
government functions – from our courts to our fire
departments – run fairly smoothly, despite carping from the
extreme right wing. Increasingly, people across America are
demanding that – like in other democracies around the world
– our system of voting should be publicly owned.

Another
point Dr. Rebecca Mercuri raises is that the Help America
Vote Act (HAVA) – passed after the 2000 election – calls for
the President to appoint, as the Act states, "with the
advice of the Senate," members to "an independent entity,
the Election Assistance Commission." The commission is then
to create "the Election Assistance Commission Standards
Board, the Election Assistance Commission Board of Advisors
... and the Technical Guidelines Development Committee" to
establish standards and oversee compliance of the law by
voting machine companies.

"But the commission has not yet
been established," says Mercuri, even though billions in
federal dollars have been distributed under HAVA for states
to buy electronic voting machines and license their software
from private corporations. "As a result," Mercuri says,
"there are currently no meaningful federal standards for
voting machines. Many of the machines used in 2002 were
built to industry guidelines that many question and were
established in 1990."

And those standards are
problematic. In the course of researching "Black Box
Voting," Harris did a Google search on one of the voting
machine companies, Diebold Election Systems, and found it
maintained an open FTP site on the internet apparently
through the 2002 election. In it, she located computer code
used to tabulate elections and, apparently, actual vote
count files that could be downloaded or even replaced by any
visiting hacker.

A website for the New Zealand news
publication The
Scoop has published Diebold's files on the Internet,
producing lively discussions among computer enthusiasts and
scientists who have apparently (and perhaps unlawfully)
cracked the company's various codes.

The Scoop also
performed a statistical analysis comparing American polls
and computer-controlled voting machine results. In many
states there were no variations. In a few, however, they
found that "the Republican Party experienced a pronounced
last minute swing in its favour of between 4 and 16 points.
Remarkably this last minute swing appears to have been
concentrated in its effects in critical Senate races
(Georgia and Minnesota) where [the Republican Party] secured
its complete control of Congress."

Purging Voter
Rolls

While corporate bungles or the potential for
outright vote fraud are a concern of many opposed to
electronic voting machines, another issue of concern is the
concentration of voter rolls in the hands of partisan
politicians instead of civil servants.

In most states,
local precincts or counties maintain their own voter rolls.
Florida, however, had gone to the trouble before the 2000
election to consolidate all its voter rolls at the state
level, and put them into the custody and control of the
state's elected Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, who
was also the chairman of the Florida campaign to elect
George W. Bush.

As described in disturbing detail in the
documentary "Unprecedented" and
in Greg Palast's book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy,"
Harris spent millions to hire a Texas company to clean up
the Florida list by purging it of all convicted felons –
using a list of felons who lived in the State of Texas.

One of the legacies of slavery is that a large number of
African Americans share the same or similar names, and sure
enough, when the Texas felon list was compared with the
Florida voter list over 94,000 matches or near-matches were
found. Those registered Florida voters – about half of them
African Americans (who generally vote Democratic) – with
names identical or even similar to Texas felons were deleted
from the Florida voter rolls, and turned away from the polls
when they tried to vote in 2000 and in 2002.

Now, under
HAVA, states across the nation are consolidating their voter
lists and handing them over to Harris's various peers to be
cleaned and maintained.

Another concern is Internet
voting, since it's impossible to ensure its accuracy.
Imagine if all the time a voting machine was being used, it
also had its back door open and an unlimited number of
technicians and hackers could manipulate its innards before,
during and after the vote.

Activists suggest this is one
of the reasons it's dangerous that so many electronic voting
machines today are connected to company-access modems, but
it's an even stronger argument against the very core of
democracy – the vote – being handled out in the public of
cyberspace.

Nonetheless, the Pentagon is moving ahead
with plans to have a private corporation conduct Internet
voting for overseas GIs in 2004, and many fear it'll be used
as a beta test for more widespread Internet voting across
the nation. While many Americans think the ability to vote
from home or office over the computer would be wonderfully
convenient, the results could be disastrous: even the CIA
hasn't been able to prevent hackers from penetrating parts
of its computer systems attached to the Internet.

Votes Are Sacred

On most levels, privatization is only
a "small sin" against democracy. Turning a nation's or
community's water, septic, roadway, prisons, airwaves or
health care commons over to private corporations has so far
demonstrably degraded the quality of life for average
citizens and enriched a few of the most powerful campaign
contributors, but it hasn't been the end of democracy.

Many citizens believe, however, that turning the
programming and maintenance of voting over to corporations
that can share their profits openly with politicians (or,
like Hagel, become the politicians), puts democracy itself
at peril.

A growing number of Americans are saying our
votes are too sacred to reside only on "chips," and that
it's critical that we kick corporations out of the commons
of our voting, and that we make sure we have a
human-verifiable vote paper trail that goes all the way back
to the original hand of the original voter.

If there are
chips involved in the voting process, these democracy
advocates say, government civil service employees who are
subject to adversarial oversight by both parties must
program them in an open-source fashion, and in a way that
produces a voter-verified paper trail.

Anything less, and
our democracy may vanish as quickly as a network of
modem-connected election-counting computers can reboot.

***********

Thom
Hartmann is a nationally syndicated daily talk show host and
the author of "Unequal Protection" and "The Last Hours of
Ancient Sunlight," among other books. This article is
copyright by Thom Hartmann, but permission is granted for
reprint in print, email, blog or web media so long as this
credit is attached and the title remains the same.
http://www.thomhartmann.com/

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